Pao claims Kleiner Perkins investigator was 'biased,’ hostile

Updated 5:37 pm, Tuesday, March 10, 2015

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - MARCH 10: Ellen Pao (C) leaves the California Superior Court Civic Center Courthouse during a lunch break from her trial on March 10, 2015 in San Francisco, California. Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao is suing her former employer, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, for $16 million alleging she was sexually harassed by male officials. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) less

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - MARCH 10: Ellen Pao (C) leaves the California Superior Court Civic Center Courthouse during a lunch break from her trial on March 10, 2015 in San Francisco, California. Reddit interim CEO ... more

Photo: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Pao claims Kleiner Perkins investigator was 'biased,’ hostile

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Accused by a fired employee of sex discrimination, venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers said it was cleared in an independent study by an outside investigator. But plaintiff Ellen Pao testified Tuesday that the investigator was not only biased and hostile, but he was also reportedly looking for a job with the firm.

Pao told a San Francisco Superior Court jury she hadn’t expected even-handed treatment from the investigator, attorney Stephen Hirschfeld, after his website showed that he conducted his reviews on behalf of employers. But she said her five-hour interview by Hirschfeld in late 2011, in her lawyer’s presence, was largely a one-sided grilling — he repeated questions until he got the answers he wanted, and stopped taking notes more than once when she said something that put the firm in a bad light.

“I found him unprofessional, antagonistic, inappropriately biased,” Pao said in her second day of testimony in the high-profile case. And she said a company executive later told her that Hirschfeld “had expressed interest in working for Kleiner Perkins. He wanted to be Kleiner Perkins’ (human resources) lawyer.”

Hirschfeld is central to the Menlo Park firm’s defense against Pao’s claim that she and other women were subjected to a sexist atmosphere and were unfairly denied promotions to revenue-sharing positions of senior partner. Pao, 45, was fired in 2012 after more than seven years at Kleiner Perkins and is now interim chief executive of Reddit, the sprawling online message board company. She is suing Kleiner Perkins for $16 million in damages.

In more than two days of testimony, Hirschfeld told the jury he found signs of a “boys’ club” atmosphere at Kleiner Perkins and concluded that another female employee, Trae Vassallo, had been treated unfairly after complaining of sexual harassment by a male co-worker, whom Pao also accused of harassment. But Hirschfeld said Pao’s more sweeping claims of bias in promotions and overall treatment of women were unsupported by the evidence, including his interviews with other female employees.

He said that he has conducted more than 100 such investigations over the past 25 years, while teaching classes on the subject to thousands of students, and that Kleiner Perkins’ chief operating officer, Eric Keller, had insisted on an independent investigation into Pao’s complaints.

The company said it denied Pao a promotion in 2012 because she didn’t get along with her colleagues, as reflected in repeated annual evaluations, and was making insufficient progress as an investor. But Pao said Kleiner Perkins promoted three male co-workers who had similar comments on their evaluations and fewer accomplishments as investors.

She also said she was denied credit for a lucrative public stock offering she helped broker — which instead was credited to a senior male partner — and was excluded, along with other women, from several meetings with potential investors.

Pao said she sued initially in May 2012 after the company endorsed Hirschfeld’s report and announced its all-male promotion list. She told the jury that things got even worse when she returned to work — Kleiner Perkins attacked her in a press release, then gave her a negative personnel evaluation that blamed her, among other things, for an assistant’s failure to invite senior partners to a meeting that took place while Pao was in the hospital.

She attended a scheduled performance review in October 2012 and said she was told instead to clean out her desk and not come back. She later amended her suit to add a claim of retaliation.

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